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City-County Consolidation and Its Alternatives: Reshaping the Local Government Landscape
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Comments/Reviews
Description: City-county consolidation builds upon the Progressive tradition of favoring structural reform of local governments. This volume looks at some important issues confronting contemporary efforts to consolidate governments and develops a theoretical approach to understanding both the motivations of pursuing consolidation and the way that rules guiding the process shape the outcome of these efforts. Individual chapters consider the push for city-county consolidation and the current context in which such decisions are debated, along with several alternatives to city-county consolidation. The transaction costs of city-county consolidation are compared against the costs of municipal annexation, interlocal agreements, and the use of special district governments to achieve the desired consolidation of services. The final chapters compare competing perspectivess for and against consolidation and put together some of the pieces of an explanatory theory of local government consolidation.
Selected Contents:
List of Tables, Figures, and Appendices
Acknowledgments
Part I: Political Consolidation and Progressive Reform
1. Perspectives on City-County Consolidation and Its Alternatives, Jered B. Carr
2. Consolidation as a Local Government Reform: Why City-County Consolidation Is an Enduring Issue, Suzanne M. Leland and Gary A. Johnson
3. Do Consolidation Entrepreneurs Make a Deal with the Devil?, Richard C. Feiock
Part II: Political Consolidation and Its Alternatives
4. Issues of Scale and Transaction Costs in City-County Consolidation, Allen B. Brierly
5. Annexation as a Form of Consolidation: An Analysis of Central Core City Boundary Expansion in the United States During the Twentieth Century, Allen B. Brierly
6. Interlocal Agreements as an Alternative to Consolidation, Kurt Thurmaier and Curtis Wood
7. Special Districts: An Alternative to Consolidation, Barbara Coyle McCabe
Part III: The Politics of City-County Consolidation
8. Revolutionary Local Constitutional Change: A Theory of the Consolidation Process, Linda S. Johnson
9. The Politics of City-County Consolidation: Findings from a National Survey, Jered B. Carr, Richard C. Feiock, and Bethany G. Sneed
10. Local Government Amalgamation from the Top Down, Raymond A. Rosenfeld and Laura A. Reese
11. Making the Case For (and Against) City-County Consolidation: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis, Linda S. Johnson and Jered B. Carr
12. Institutional Choice, Collective Action, and Governance, Richard C. Feiock
About the Editors and Contributors
Index
Comment(s): "This extraordinary collection of research on city-county consolidation and its variances is invaluable to scholars and practitioners alike. This is the most comprehensive work in terms of breadth and depth on local government boundary changes ever published. Well written, comprehensive, and thoroughly researched, this volume provides answers to the most important questions communities ask when considering boundary changes. This volume provides the greatest understanding of local government boundary changes from many perspectives." -- Tanis J. Salant, The University of Arizona
"This volume brings together insights from institutional analysis, transaction cost economics, the study of public entrepreneurship, and constitutional decision making to provide an analysis of the benefits and costs involved in making decisions concerning local government consolidation. . . . This should be a required textbook for upper division courses in urban politics and, before groups engage in these processes, they should give this book a careful read." -- Elinor Ostrom, Indiana University
" City-County Consolidation and Its Alternatives breathes life into a topic that was central to the debates over urban governance and urban political science for decades but languished during the last 15 years. ... The authors bring a new level of sophistication and new perspectives on the study of local politics to bear on the perennial issue of consolidation." -- Mark Schneider, SUNY Stony Brook
Review(s): The contributors pose some tough questions... The answers presented in this volume should make local officials think hard before they advocate city-county consolidation. The editors are commended for providing much more than a simple compilation of studies. These two works are truly significant and path breaking. They should be mandatory reading for anyone hoping to understand urban governments as well as for those who aspire to improve them. State and Local Government Review, Vol. 37, No.1
    
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